Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Thai language

(Encyclopedia)Thai language tī [key], formerly Siamese, member of the Tai or Thai subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages (see Sino-Tibetan languages). The official language of Thailand, Thai is spoken b...

Gothic language

(Encyclopedia)Gothic language, dead language belonging to the now extinct East Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages). Gothic has special value fo...

Armenian language

(Encyclopedia)Armenian language, member of the Thraco-Phrygian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Indo-European). There is evidence that in ancient times a distinct subfamily of Indo-European l...

Belarusian language

(Encyclopedia)Belarusian language or White Russian: see Russian language; Slavic languages. ...

Ukrainian language

(Encyclopedia)Ukrainian language, also called Little Russian: see Russian language; Slavic languages. ...

Swahili language

(Encyclopedia)Swahili language, member of the Bantu group of African languages (see African languages and Bantu languages). Swahili is spoken by 30 million people, chiefly in Tanzania, Kenya, Congo (Kinshasa), Buru...

creole language

(Encyclopedia)creole language krēōlˈ [key], any language that began as a pidgin but was later adopted as the mother tongue by a people in place of the original mother tongue or tongues. Examples are the Gullah o...

Assyrian language

(Encyclopedia)Assyrian language, East Semitic dialect that evolved from Akkadian after 1950 b.c. The term Assyrian is sometimes incorrectly used for the Akkadian language as a whole because the first inscriptions i...

Persian language

(Encyclopedia)Persian language, member of the Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Indo-Iranian languages). The official language of Iran, it has about 38 millio...

Browse by Subject